Impacts, standards, and perceived crowding on the Deschutes River : extending carrying capacity research PublicDeposited

Descriptions

In response to increasing recreation use, many resource
managers have set use limits or carrying capacities
in an attempt to protect the quality of experiences.
These limits require definitions of quality which involve
evaluative information about appropriate use levels or
use conditions. Two papers are presented examining different
approaches for collecting and analyzing evaluative
information, based on data from a 1987 survey of boaters
on Oregon's Deschutes River.
The first paper examines the utility of the social
norm concept for establishing evaluative standards. Results
suggest that social norms can be identified for a
variety of impacts in a variety of settings, and that
there are different identifiable types of norms. A "no
tolerance" norm exists when strong majorities of users
report that any impact is unacceptable, a "single tolerance"
norm exists when users report similar standards at some impact level greater than zero, and a "multiple
tolerance" norm exists when there are two or more groups
of users with standards at differing impact levels, perhaps
reflecting different experience definitions. Norm
crystallization, the level of group agreement, is strongest
for no tolerance norms and weakest for multiple tolerance
norms.
The second paper investigates the effects of objective
use conditions and comparisons of those conditions
with personal standards on perceived crowding.
Results support the common research focus upon social
interaction or encounters. These impacts are more
strongly related to crowding than environmental or resource
competition impacts. However, results provide
less support for previous research which suggests that
crowding is best understood as having both objective and
subjective components. In a test of this idea, variables
representing comparisons of impact conditions with subjective
personal standards explained less of the variance
in perceived crowding than variables representing objective
conditions alone.